Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873)

Death of the Chief Justice

Chase was stricken with a stroke at the home
of his daughter Nettie in New York City. He succumbed to death
on May 7, 1873 with his two daughters and Senator William Sprague
at his side.

A funeral was held in the Episcopal Church
of St. George in New York City. On May 11 the body was taken back
to Washington, D.C. for a formal state funeral. The Chief Justice
laid in State in the Old Senate Chambers on the same catafalque that had held
the brier of President Lincoln.[26]
He was laid to rest at the Oak Hill cemetery outside of the capital. In
1886, the State of Ohio requested that it's favorite son be buried in
Cincinnati.
Salmon Chase and his daughter Kate who died in poverty in 1899 rest together
at the Spring Grove Cemetery outside Chase's beloved Cincinnati.

Salmon Portland Chase's ambition to be president
for the 'good of the country' will always be remembered more so
than his abilities as the man who hated slavery, suffering both
personal and financial losses but continuing to be committed that
slavery was a sin, as a senator who organized the Republican party;
a governor who ahead of his time did not believe capital punishment
was a deterrent to crime and improved the State of Ohio correctional
facilities; as a Treasury Secretary with a small amount of specie
in the treasury to finance a war that was not supposed to last
as long as it did. Only by students of the Supreme Court will
Chase be remembered as the man who prevented what may have been
a major national crisis so soon after the Civil War, with his
insistence of a judicial atmosphere at the Impeachment trial of
Andrew Johnson. His performance in preventing any major confrontations
with the Congress over the reconstruction of the south make it
clearly evident that Salmon P. Chase was a capable Chief Justice
and a statesman of high order. In 1934 the United States Treasury
honored the memory of the Treasury Secretary by placing his portrait
on the ten thousand federal reserve note.